‘US empire is on its last legs’: Dennis Etler

“The US empire is on its last legs” and will never be able to regain its past glory, but it will not give up its global hegemony without a struggle, according to Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.

Former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul has said that the American empire is teetering on the edge of collapse.

In his latest Ron Paul Liberty Report broadcast, the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, said that the signs of the collapse of the Empire are already there: Aggressive US foreign policy, self-destructive monetary policy that debases the currency and hides inflation, a monstrous national and individual debt load.

PressTV-American empire teetering on collapse: Ron Paul

Former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul has said that the American empire is teetering on the edge of collapse.

“Former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul is one of the few American politicians who has a clear-headed understanding of the US economy and its foreign policy. The vast majority of politicians, of whatever party affiliation or political persuasion, blithely go about business as usual as if a little tinkering around the edges will solve the country’s systemic problems,” Professor Etler said.

"The Republicans under the dictate of President Trump have abandoned all pretense to being fiscally conservative or ‘champions’ of the post-WW2 ‘free world’ imperium. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to say, ‘Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus.’ The problem with this rhetoric, as Ron Paul has so vehemently stated, is that in the long term deficit spending and the resulting national debt do matter, and it is foolish to think otherwise. The deficit is only possible by printing money and then selling bonds on the open market to finance it. Eventually, there won’t be enough buyers for the devalued currency, the US dollar will lose its cachet, and its reserve currency status will be threatened. Once that happens the latent inflation that has until now been masked will set in with a hyper-inflationary episode, as seen in Argentina and elsewhere, as a distinct possibility,” he noted.

“In terms of foreign policy, the Republicans under Trump have reverted to a pre-WW1 policy of gunboat diplomacy and brinkmanship. Bipartisan alliances forged after WW2 with Western democracies have been shunted aside for go it alone initiatives which lack the international support that previous administrations sought after. The result is an incoherent foreign policy that has alienated friend and foe alike,” he stated.

“The Democrats are the flip side of the same coin. Their social agenda is simply pandering to the demands of the struggling American people who are burdened with debt and insecurity. Household debt brought on by the lack of good-paying jobs and the need to borrow for housing, education, healthcare, childcare and eldercare burden the average middle-class American family to the point that many are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or just barely keeping their heads above water. Without a deep structural change to the US economic and political systems, the Democrats will never be able to implement their pie in the sky social and economic agenda,” he observed.

|In terms of foreign policy, the Democrats, even the progressives within their midst, still adhere to a policy of American exceptionalism and indispensability. They continue to see the ‘American way’ as the only way on a one-way street of adherence to US dictates overseas. But, the US is no longer king of the hill and has to eventually learn to live with the fact that it doesn’t call the shots any longer,” he said.

“As Ron Paul has noted the US empire is on its last legs and will never be able to regain its previous glory, but it will not give up the ghost of global hegemony easily or quickly. The world is in for a long slog before the US recognizes its place as just one nation among many, no better nor worse than any other,” he concluded.

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